


Afterlife

by MountainFire



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: End of the show bit, idk what else to tag this as
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:13:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23420743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainFire/pseuds/MountainFire
Summary: There’s a new quiet to this world, Finn thinks.It was probably always there, he realizes, but the last four years of revelations and chaos had buried it beneath a hulking roar.(AKA, the story’s not done until I say it is.)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	Afterlife

There’s a new quiet to this world, Finn thinks. 

It was probably always there, he realizes, but the last four years of revelations and chaos had buried it beneath a hulking roar. In the thousands of years that this world has existed, it’s amazing that he watched the world teeter at its end, and then come crashing back to land firm. He’s only one human, after all. All of the years that have gone by have had so much to them, and he witnessed it all with his own, very human eyes.

Jakes seems less impressed by it all. “Eh,” he says. “If it wasn’t us, it’d’ve been the next batch of humans, or human-things, or dog people. Or whatever.”

Finn thinks he’s pretty lucky to have seen it, even if Jake doesn’t. 

He’s seen a lot of things. 

The universe at the edge of collapse. An ancient god awakened, returned to wreak havoc on the land it had forgotten. The same ancient god made new, fused into a new abomination with the remains of a woman Simon had loved. He saw time rewind itself in Simon’s mind, giving him a second chance and a new life, yet still imperfect in his loss. 

He saw Marceline and PB, as fear finally ripped their inhibitions away. 

He watched a family reunited, and yet a romance torn apart. 

He’s watched it with his own two eyes, standing in a battle-torn wasteland, and he will perhaps tell the story a thousand times again.

He will perhaps be the only person who saw it, who will not live another thousand years to tell it a thousand times more. He feels small and insignificant in light of this thought, and yet somehow also immeasurably privileged by it – a single human being, incredibly small and incredibly short-lived, witnessing an event to which even the other gods were not privy.

Jake gives him a funny look when he expresses these thoughts.

“...You’re way deep in your head again, Finn,” Jake informs. Which. Finn knows that, of course.

He’s just. Dumbstruck. By which to say, he’s struck by a good, big splash of being a dump, but also he’s at a loss for words. A loss of how to describe the fact that he’s being reminded of his own mortality a lot more than he would like to be. 

He feels old in his own skin. He expects to see a lot of wrinkles on his face when he looks into a puddle. He expects his joints to ache and crackle when he stands up. He expects the pain and weariness of age to show on his body and they never do because he’s not old. He expects to many of his days to be the last one, when he still has a long way to go.

So. He’s not entirely at a loss for words, but maybe at a loss for good ones.

“We’ve been through a lot,” Marceline agrees when he tells her these thoughts. “I mean I was never a human, but I think I get the whole mortality thing you’re talking about. I knew a few people back in the days.”

She looks wistful. Fin doesn’t ask about it.

She’s not a human either. He looks down at his hand and his calloused, rough skin and strong tendons stretching across the back. This is the hand of a human man. He wonders again how old he is. How do humans work? How old is he before he’s a man?

Everyone he knows his – well. They’re a lot older than he is. He’s the youngest and he doesn’t see them growing older with him. As age warps his mind and body, they’ll still be young and energetic. Marceline and PB will be settling in together, Jake and Lady will still be young and in love, everyone will be getting back to their regular lives and loves, before this war, and he will be growing old and fading away.

Princess bubblegum looks really concerned by him talking about all these weird feelings.

“I could help you live longer,” she suggests, unsurely. Like she’s not sure if he’s asking her to do that or not.

And, no. He’s not. That’s not it. He’s not dying or anything anytime soon, it’s more like... He’s got a curfew on this afterparty and none of the rest of them do. So he’s watching the clock a lot more closely than they are. He’s still having a lot of fun and a lot of adventure and he spending every day with his best friend and his other best friends and his OTHER-other best friends, but it doesn’t feel like it used to. He feels older, sometimes less like old-man-old and more like I-am-now-an-adult-Old, like he’s got this new sort of maturity that he didn’t have before and he’s not sure what to do with it. 

They’re pretty close to the end of this story, Fin thinks.

He watches the sun set on another day.

**Author's Note:**

> Nah


End file.
